Read up on herd immunity. A large part of the effectiveness of vaccines is that beyond the individual protection they confer on most recipients, they also protect the unvaccinated and the ones that the vaccine wasn't effective for if the overall rate of vaccination is high enough.
That's why the people who choose not to vaccinate their kids are also increasing the risk for the kids that did get the vaccine but for whom it wasn't effective for some reason, the kids that haven't been vaccinated yet because they're too young, and the kids that for some reason - e.g. compromised immune system - can't get the vaccine at all.
Look at appharbor.com. Their slogan is Azure done right: you get ASP.NET 4.0 hosting, a Git repository, continuous integration and unit testing upon deployment, SQL Server instances, etc.. Basically everything you're asking for. Their backend is 'the cloud': Amazon EC2.
Their rates start at 'free', so there is no cost while you're busy getting your millions of accounts and hits. When that happens move to one of their paid tiers and go nuts.
YMMV.. I have a pair of Panasonic powerline network adapters. I get about 45 mbps sustained (indeed these adapters are also "up to 200 mbps"), but the latency is quite decent at less than 5 ms extra latency compared to an ordinary wire.
I'm very happy with this solution since my apartment is bombarded with competing WiFi networks from the neighbors as well as the super-crappy old microwaves my apartment complex uses that completely kill anything at 2.4 GHz.
My wife got a new Lenovo IdeaPad S10 a couple of weeks ago. Despite its pink exterior, I've taken the liberty of playing around with it a bit. It came with the standard Windows XP Home that most netbooks come with, and I installed Ubuntu 7.10 and the public Windows 7 beta.
The Windows 7 beta performs far better than the pre-installed Windows XP Home - even after removing the factory installed junk - and the user interface is much better suited for the small form factor than XP is. My favorite example is how they made the task bar better suited to being placed at the side of the screen instead of the top or bottom. On a device with a resolution of 1024x600, this is the kind of minor visual tweak that makes the system much nicer to use.
I've already decided to shell out hard-earned cash for the Windows 7 once it's released, which will be the first time I've bought a boxed version of Windows. My wife dual-booted between Ubuntu and Windows 7 for a couple of days (she's not technical at all, so I'm as shocked as you are that she even accepted my suggestion of dual-booting) and ended up sticking with Windows 7, because "it's faster and easier to use than the other one.. besides it's pretty!".
No, I don't have any relation to Microsoft. I just think Windows 7 is really looking quite good so far.
Honestly I thought their motion on this point was rather well written. I certainly disagree with pretty much everything they say and do, but in this case isn't their point simply: we're going to appeal the order granting a second trial if there's a second trial and we lose it; instead of going through all that work, let us already now appeal the point of law that might make the whole thing moot anyway.
If anything, isn't it a good thing for us to get an appeals level ruling on this point of law? They appeal this point - the judge basically throwing out their ridiculous 'making available' theory - the RIAA loses andthe judge's ruling is upheld: voila, we now have binding precedent in this circuit, and a mighty persuasive ruling for lawyers in other circuits to point to.
They obviously think they might win on appeal. Let them try and fail miserably. I'd rather see that sooner than later..
Conversations on GSM cell phone networks are encrypted from phone to tower, albeit with a craptastic and weak encryption algorithm. If the designers of the GSM system had done their work better and/or not bowed to pressure to intentionally weaken the algorithm, we could have had great encryption for the majority of the cell phone usage in the world today.
Of course this only protects from phone to tower, and it's a weak protection against sufficiently determined attackers, but for most private people's purposes it's probably 'well enough'.
No: Denmark has not protested formally. Denmark is represented in ISO by Dansk Standard which, as you may recall, somewhat controversially changed its vote to "Yes".
This is a protest letter from Foreningen af Open Source Leverandører a vendor's association (literally: "The Association of Open Source Vendors", their official English title seems to be "The Danish Open Source Business Association"). They happened to be part of the technical committee (as I understand it, I may be wrong) in Denmark, but are not formal representatives of Dansk Standard.
The recipient of the letter, Jacob Holmblad, is the managing director of Dansk Standard, who also happens to be vice-president of technical management at ISO.
While an interesting complaint, which raises a number of pertinent issues, this is not a formal complaint from a national standards body as those from South Africa, Brazil, and India.
No, my H1-B status hasn't been used to pressure me in any way. Any extra hours I work I choose myself, and they are fully compensated either by time off or being paid out.
I'll agree that the H1-B program gives employers too much power, however, how the employer wields that power is the true test. I have no doubt at all, that some companies abuse that power massively. But, believe me or not, the opposite does also happen: companies do exist, that use the H1-B system as intended (to bring in skilled workers for positions they can't otherwise fill) and without taking advantage of those employees.
Those statistics may be correct, I wouldn't be surprised if they were, however I equally doubt that I will have any problems. The statistics cover the entire U.S. population. Including a large number of what I would consider, by Danish or other standards, poor people. As I wrote earlier, I have excellent health insurance and I'm not poor. I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy to be poor in the U.S. or without decent health insurance.
When discussing the U.S. vs. Denmark with Americans, I usually explain it like this: if I ever get down on my luck by losing my job, insurance or something similar, I would much prefer Denmark and would probably move back very quickly. As it is, I'm higher middle class, good insurance and I much prefer the U.S. Perhaps not very ethical - wanting the benefits of a high-tax country like Denmark without paying my "dues" while not in need - but something I consider very pragmatic.
Let me be a counter-example to your story. I recently moved to the U.S. from one of those "semi-socialist" countries; Denmark to be precise. I now live in southern California after being born and having lived in Denmark most of my life. I've also lived two years in the U.S. previously as a child, as well as a year in Vietnam working.
I'm here on one of the much reviled (on Slashdot anyway) H1-B visas. I'm highly educated, M.Sc. in Computer Engineering, and well paid by my American company with excellent insurance and other benefits. I consider myself the precise type of person envisioned by the H1-B program, and I consider myself lucky to get into the U.S. through such a system.
I couldn't be happier here to be honest. Not because of the healthcare system here (which I actually do consider to be better than the universal tax paid system in Denmark, but I'm acutely aware that this is primarily because my company offers excellent health insurance), not because of the lower taxes (although that is a very nice bonus), or any other materialistic desires. I love it here because of the people here and the opportunities here.
I'll be the first to agree, that I think the Bush administration, and the ideology it represents, is nuts. For all the patriotism that Americans exhibit: "greatest country in the world", "champion of democracy and free speech" and so forth, there is an incredible disconnect from how things work in the rest of the world (do you think we're suppressed in Western Europe?) as well as another mindboggling disconnect on the actual state of things in the U.S. ('free speech' at the immigration riots in L.A., innumerable stories in Slashdot's YRO, etc.). And news in the U.S. media is so incredibly primitive it's amazing.. no wonder people's worldview is skewed.
For all of this, I'm still head over heels for this country. The mentality here is just so much nicer than the typical Danish way to view the world. Here, the sky is the limit; "the American dream" may be a cliché, but there is something true about it. I miss my friends and family from back home, but I don't miss the country.
Denmark has the same chip-and-pin system as talked about in this thread. Some scammers did exactly as you suggested. They copied cards by mounting an extra reader at a bonafide gas station. After copying the magnetic strip and PIN, they created cloned cards which were used to withdraw cash at regular ATMs.
The response from Danish banks, however, was just as simple. The banks rushed forward the phase-out of allowing cards without a working chip. Within a couple of months of this scam, all Danish ATMs were modified to reject all Danish-issued cards without a working chip.
I don't know enough about the quality of Sony products in general to agree or disagree with your comment. But I find it just a little bit funny, that the two Dell batteries I have, which are part of this recall, were both manufactured in Japan.
Yes, he's the grandson of Niels Bohr. His two cousins, Henrik and Jakob Bohr, are also professors at the Department of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark.
Why, exactly, is it stupid for the salesperson to ask you what you want to use the computer for?
It may be utopian to actually expect people to know this beforehand, but it is quite unfair to expect someone to guide you to 'the right' computer, when giving no input at all to what this perfect computer might be used for.
Note, this deliberately ignores the fact that most salespeople probably wouldn't be able to help you even if you did know what you wanted to do with the computer. That's a completely different issue.
At work I use Outlook connected to an Exchange server and wouldn't dream of changing to Thunderbird and associated programs. Sure I use Outlook extensively for mail, but I use it just as much for scheduling meetings, reminders etc.
At home I use Thunderbird for my POP3 and IMAP accounts after changing from Outlook some months ago. Thunderbird is lighter both in footprint and user interface and serves my purposes excellently for the things I need at home.
In fact, the Word document format hasn't changed since Word 97. So any Word version from 1997 or onwards will do the job.
And changing the settings to saving in RTF format by default (enabling Word versions from Word 6.0 through 2003, as well as basically all other word processors, to read the documents) isn't all that hard. Not even in a corporate setting.
Microsofts encourages upgrading of Office installations through a lot of questionable means, but the Word document format isn't one of them.
Ah, good times. I know that IBM had some production version of those add-ons in 1992. My old IBM PS/2 model 56 - basically a cut-down model 80 - got an upgrade with an 486 SLC2 I believe they were called.
Oh, get over yourself.
I sincerely respect what these guys have done. It is very impressive. However, to claim that this would require an intimate, masterful understanding of almost every aspect of computer science is utter baloney.
They're great coders no doubt, but a 'masterful understanding of computer science' is a hell of a lot more than coding. It's domain specifications, requirements, design methodologies and a lot more.. including coding which is obviously important, but hardly the only thing.
Exactly - which is why I note that encrypting even a few kilobytes is expensive. A session key of 128-256 bits plus overhead can still be slow to encrypt with a large a RSA key, which is why ECC is interesting especially on constrained devices such as smart cards.
RSA - and most public key systems - are extremely slow when compared to symmetric systems such as DES, AES etc.
Sure, RSA is readily usable on desktops, but you don't need a very large key before even a simple encryption og a few kilobytes becomes an expensive operation.
Besides, desktop computers is hardly the only environment in which encryption is used. Smart cards, which are often limited in both CPU and RAM, benefit hugely from ECC where the computing and memory overhead is much smaller./pah
I can verify this. Main Danish Internet access was totally unaffected by the blackout that encompassed all of Copenhagen - the Danish capital - and most of the rest of the island of Zealand.
I work right next to where the central Danish Internet Exchange (the 'DIX') is located. My company's servers are on a standard UPS so we had power for a couple of hours before we ran dry. While we still had power, our network connectivity was completely unaffected. The DIX and most major Danish ISPs have excellent power redundancy.
When we first started calling our customers, several of them hadn't heard about the blackout yet and were grateful for getting notified before we gracefully shut down the servers before backup power went out.
It's interesting to see how much this differs between countries. Someone else noted, that number portability is very easy, and essentially free, in the UK, because of the intense competion between cell providers.
It's the same situation in Denmark: basically no one charges when transferring your number from another provider, since they are desperate to get you to change. Couple that with 1 DKR per minute (~15 cents), no monthly fee and no contract that binds you.
Slashdot Mirror
Read up on herd immunity. A large part of the effectiveness of vaccines is that beyond the individual protection they confer on most recipients, they also protect the unvaccinated and the ones that the vaccine wasn't effective for if the overall rate of vaccination is high enough.
That's why the people who choose not to vaccinate their kids are also increasing the risk for the kids that did get the vaccine but for whom it wasn't effective for some reason, the kids that haven't been vaccinated yet because they're too young, and the kids that for some reason - e.g. compromised immune system - can't get the vaccine at all.
Look at appharbor.com. Their slogan is Azure done right: you get ASP.NET 4.0 hosting, a Git repository, continuous integration and unit testing upon deployment, SQL Server instances, etc.. Basically everything you're asking for. Their backend is 'the cloud': Amazon EC2.
Their rates start at 'free', so there is no cost while you're busy getting your millions of accounts and hits. When that happens move to one of their paid tiers and go nuts.
YMMV.. I have a pair of Panasonic powerline network adapters. I get about 45 mbps sustained (indeed these adapters are also "up to 200 mbps"), but the latency is quite decent at less than 5 ms extra latency compared to an ordinary wire.
I'm very happy with this solution since my apartment is bombarded with competing WiFi networks from the neighbors as well as the super-crappy old microwaves my apartment complex uses that completely kill anything at 2.4 GHz.
I very much disagree.
My wife got a new Lenovo IdeaPad S10 a couple of weeks ago. Despite its pink exterior, I've taken the liberty of playing around with it a bit. It came with the standard Windows XP Home that most netbooks come with, and I installed Ubuntu 7.10 and the public Windows 7 beta.
The Windows 7 beta performs far better than the pre-installed Windows XP Home - even after removing the factory installed junk - and the user interface is much better suited for the small form factor than XP is. My favorite example is how they made the task bar better suited to being placed at the side of the screen instead of the top or bottom. On a device with a resolution of 1024x600, this is the kind of minor visual tweak that makes the system much nicer to use.
I've already decided to shell out hard-earned cash for the Windows 7 once it's released, which will be the first time I've bought a boxed version of Windows. My wife dual-booted between Ubuntu and Windows 7 for a couple of days (she's not technical at all, so I'm as shocked as you are that she even accepted my suggestion of dual-booting) and ended up sticking with Windows 7, because "it's faster and easier to use than the other one.. besides it's pretty!".
No, I don't have any relation to Microsoft. I just think Windows 7 is really looking quite good so far.
Honestly I thought their motion on this point was rather well written. I certainly disagree with pretty much everything they say and do, but in this case isn't their point simply: we're going to appeal the order granting a second trial if there's a second trial and we lose it; instead of going through all that work, let us already now appeal the point of law that might make the whole thing moot anyway.
If anything, isn't it a good thing for us to get an appeals level ruling on this point of law? They appeal this point - the judge basically throwing out their ridiculous 'making available' theory - the RIAA loses andthe judge's ruling is upheld: voila, we now have binding precedent in this circuit, and a mighty persuasive ruling for lawyers in other circuits to point to.
They obviously think they might win on appeal. Let them try and fail miserably. I'd rather see that sooner than later..
Well, that's really not correct.
Conversations on GSM cell phone networks are encrypted from phone to tower, albeit with a craptastic and weak encryption algorithm. If the designers of the GSM system had done their work better and/or not bowed to pressure to intentionally weaken the algorithm, we could have had great encryption for the majority of the cell phone usage in the world today.
Of course this only protects from phone to tower, and it's a weak protection against sufficiently determined attackers, but for most private people's purposes it's probably 'well enough'.
No: Denmark has not protested formally. Denmark is represented in ISO by Dansk Standard which, as you may recall, somewhat controversially changed its vote to "Yes".
This is a protest letter from Foreningen af Open Source Leverandører a vendor's association (literally: "The Association of Open Source Vendors", their official English title seems to be "The Danish Open Source Business Association"). They happened to be part of the technical committee (as I understand it, I may be wrong) in Denmark, but are not formal representatives of Dansk Standard.
The recipient of the letter, Jacob Holmblad, is the managing director of Dansk Standard, who also happens to be vice-president of technical management at ISO.
While an interesting complaint, which raises a number of pertinent issues, this is not a formal complaint from a national standards body as those from South Africa, Brazil, and India.
No, my H1-B status hasn't been used to pressure me in any way. Any extra hours I work I choose myself, and they are fully compensated either by time off or being paid out.
I'll agree that the H1-B program gives employers too much power, however, how the employer wields that power is the true test. I have no doubt at all, that some companies abuse that power massively. But, believe me or not, the opposite does also happen: companies do exist, that use the H1-B system as intended (to bring in skilled workers for positions they can't otherwise fill) and without taking advantage of those employees.
Those statistics may be correct, I wouldn't be surprised if they were, however I equally doubt that I will have any problems. The statistics cover the entire U.S. population. Including a large number of what I would consider, by Danish or other standards, poor people. As I wrote earlier, I have excellent health insurance and I'm not poor. I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy to be poor in the U.S. or without decent health insurance.
When discussing the U.S. vs. Denmark with Americans, I usually explain it like this: if I ever get down on my luck by losing my job, insurance or something similar, I would much prefer Denmark and would probably move back very quickly. As it is, I'm higher middle class, good insurance and I much prefer the U.S. Perhaps not very ethical - wanting the benefits of a high-tax country like Denmark without paying my "dues" while not in need - but something I consider very pragmatic.
Let me be a counter-example to your story. I recently moved to the U.S. from one of those "semi-socialist" countries; Denmark to be precise. I now live in southern California after being born and having lived in Denmark most of my life. I've also lived two years in the U.S. previously as a child, as well as a year in Vietnam working.
I'm here on one of the much reviled (on Slashdot anyway) H1-B visas. I'm highly educated, M.Sc. in Computer Engineering, and well paid by my American company with excellent insurance and other benefits. I consider myself the precise type of person envisioned by the H1-B program, and I consider myself lucky to get into the U.S. through such a system.
I couldn't be happier here to be honest. Not because of the healthcare system here (which I actually do consider to be better than the universal tax paid system in Denmark, but I'm acutely aware that this is primarily because my company offers excellent health insurance), not because of the lower taxes (although that is a very nice bonus), or any other materialistic desires. I love it here because of the people here and the opportunities here.
I'll be the first to agree, that I think the Bush administration, and the ideology it represents, is nuts. For all the patriotism that Americans exhibit: "greatest country in the world", "champion of democracy and free speech" and so forth, there is an incredible disconnect from how things work in the rest of the world (do you think we're suppressed in Western Europe?) as well as another mindboggling disconnect on the actual state of things in the U.S. ('free speech' at the immigration riots in L.A., innumerable stories in Slashdot's YRO, etc.). And news in the U.S. media is so incredibly primitive it's amazing.. no wonder people's worldview is skewed.
For all of this, I'm still head over heels for this country. The mentality here is just so much nicer than the typical Danish way to view the world. Here, the sky is the limit; "the American dream" may be a cliché, but there is something true about it. I miss my friends and family from back home, but I don't miss the country.
You are quite right:
Denmark has the same chip-and-pin system as talked about in this thread. Some scammers did exactly as you suggested. They copied cards by mounting an extra reader at a bonafide gas station. After copying the magnetic strip and PIN, they created cloned cards which were used to withdraw cash at regular ATMs.
The response from Danish banks, however, was just as simple. The banks rushed forward the phase-out of allowing cards without a working chip. Within a couple of months of this scam, all Danish ATMs were modified to reject all Danish-issued cards without a working chip.
I don't know enough about the quality of Sony products in general to agree or disagree with your comment. But I find it just a little bit funny, that the two Dell batteries I have, which are part of this recall, were both manufactured in Japan.
Yes, he's the grandson of Niels Bohr. His two cousins, Henrik and Jakob Bohr, are also professors at the Department of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark.
Why, exactly, is it stupid for the salesperson to ask you what you want to use the computer for?
It may be utopian to actually expect people to know this beforehand, but it is quite unfair to expect someone to guide you to 'the right' computer, when giving no input at all to what this perfect computer might be used for.
Note, this deliberately ignores the fact that most salespeople probably wouldn't be able to help you even if you did know what you wanted to do with the computer. That's a completely different issue.
Absolutely.
At work I use Outlook connected to an Exchange server and wouldn't dream of changing to Thunderbird and associated programs. Sure I use Outlook extensively for mail, but I use it just as much for scheduling meetings, reminders etc.
At home I use Thunderbird for my POP3 and IMAP accounts after changing from Outlook some months ago. Thunderbird is lighter both in footprint and user interface and serves my purposes excellently for the things I need at home.
In fact, the Word document format hasn't changed since Word 97. So any Word version from 1997 or onwards will do the job.
And changing the settings to saving in RTF format by default (enabling Word versions from Word 6.0 through 2003, as well as basically all other word processors, to read the documents) isn't all that hard. Not even in a corporate setting.
Microsofts encourages upgrading of Office installations through a lot of questionable means, but the Word document format isn't one of them.
Ah, good times. I know that IBM had some production version of those add-ons in 1992. My old IBM PS/2 model 56 - basically a cut-down model 80 - got an upgrade with an 486 SLC2 I believe they were called.
Well, yeah.
Not much you can do about buggy code running in priviledged mode no matter what operating system you're running.
Oh, get over yourself. I sincerely respect what these guys have done. It is very impressive. However, to claim that this would require an intimate, masterful understanding of almost every aspect of computer science is utter baloney. They're great coders no doubt, but a 'masterful understanding of computer science' is a hell of a lot more than coding. It's domain specifications, requirements, design methodologies and a lot more.. including coding which is obviously important, but hardly the only thing.
Exactly - which is why I note that encrypting even a few kilobytes is expensive. A session key of 128-256 bits plus overhead can still be slow to encrypt with a large a RSA key, which is why ECC is interesting especially on constrained devices such as smart cards.
I call an ignorant..
/pah
RSA - and most public key systems - are extremely slow when compared to symmetric systems such as DES, AES etc.
Sure, RSA is readily usable on desktops, but you don't need a very large key before even a simple encryption og a few kilobytes becomes an expensive operation.
Besides, desktop computers is hardly the only environment in which encryption is used. Smart cards, which are often limited in both CPU and RAM, benefit hugely from ECC where the computing and memory overhead is much smaller.
I can verify this. Main Danish Internet access was totally unaffected by the blackout that encompassed all of Copenhagen - the Danish capital - and most of the rest of the island of Zealand.
I work right next to where the central Danish Internet Exchange (the 'DIX') is located. My company's servers are on a standard UPS so we had power for a couple of hours before we ran dry. While we still had power, our network connectivity was completely unaffected. The DIX and most major Danish ISPs have excellent power redundancy.
When we first started calling our customers, several of them hadn't heard about the blackout yet and were grateful for getting notified before we gracefully shut down the servers before backup power went out.
It's interesting to see how much this differs between countries. Someone else noted, that number portability is very easy, and essentially free, in the UK, because of the intense competion between cell providers.
It's the same situation in Denmark: basically no one charges when transferring your number from another provider, since they are desperate to get you to change. Couple that with 1 DKR per minute (~15 cents), no monthly fee and no contract that binds you.
Plenty of people are behind proxies and NAT-like technology, that make a potentially large number of users seem to come from the same IP-address.
Blocking users based on the number of connections from their IP-address is not an option.
/pah